John Whalen

Cohort 1

April 2025

Cohort 2

June 2025

May 2025

August 2025

November 2025

July 2025

October 2025

September 2025

Schedules alternate by cohort to support multiple time zones. This cohort meets in the evening (ET).


February 2026

Schedules alternate by cohort to support multiple time zones. This cohort meets in the afternoon (ET).


March 2026

Schedules alternate by cohort to support multiple time zones. This cohort meets in the evening (ET).

April 2026

Schedules alternate by cohort to support multiple time zones. This cohort meets evenings (ET).


Schedules alternate by cohort to support multiple time zones. This cohort meets afternoons (ET).

May 2026

June-July 2026

Facing AI-driven change? Download The Future of UX Research Roles – A Primer for AI-Aware Researchers to understand how AI is evolving your role from data collector to strategic orchestrator. Inside, explore AI-powered workflow shifts, debunk common fears, identify the five key skills you’ll need, and preview cutting-edge tools. Future-proof your career—adapt with confidence, maintain human insight, and lead in the AI era.

The Future of UX Research Roles – A Primer for AI-Aware Researchers

Ready to supercharge your UX research? Download AI-Powered Analysis – A Primer for UX Researchers, adapted from John Whalen, PhD’s AI for Customer Research course. Discover how to leverage AI’s speed and scale while maintaining human rigor. You’ll get step-by-step guidance on summarizing transcripts at scale, clustering themes, linking qualitative insights to metrics, and best practices for validating AI outputs. Whether you’re handling 10 interviews or 1,000, this primer equips you to integrate AI into every stage of your analysis.

AI-Powered Analysis – A Primer for Researchers

Tired of slow, repetitive UX research tasks? This free guide shows you how to master prompt engineering to supercharge your research with AI—cutting hours off analysis, boosting insight depth, and keeping your work truly human-centered. Learn powerful meta-prompts, best practices, and practical examples you can use immediately. Download now to transform your workflow and future-proof your skills!

Transform Your UX
Research with AI: Master
Prompt Engineering

Synthetic Users – A Primer for Researchers

Discover how AI-moderated interviews can transform your UX research! This primer reveals when AI shines, where it falls short, and how to use it effectively. You’ll learn practical strategies for faster, scalable insights without sacrificing research integrity. Whether you're curious, skeptical, or ready to experiment, this guide provides clear examples, best practices, and tool recommendations to help you leverage AI and stay ahead in a rapidly evolving research landscape.

AI-Moderated Interviews – An Introductory Primer for Researchers

We conducted a head-to-head test of humans and AI-tools each performing research tasks such as designing studies, moderating interviews, analyzing results, and creating deliverables. We then had expert researchers blindly evaluate the output from AI and humans to learn when AI tools performed well, and when humans are indispensable. Download a 1-page brief summarizing our findings to find out when AI tools were most valuable!

AI vs Humans - A User Research Showdown

Learn to build AI agents and workflows—developing judgment for what works, what doesn't, and how to adapt as capabilities evolve.

AI Research Expert | Johns Hopkins PhD

Agentic AI for Research: Build Custom Workflows & Synthetic Users

Principal, UX Research

Strategic UX Research & Innovation Expert | UX Research Leader 

User Experience Architect

Group Creative Director

Sr UX Researcher II

UX Reseacher

Lead Experience Researcher

Principal UX Researcher

Sr product UX researcher

Senior Product Designer

Gain hands-on mastery of AI research tools and frameworks to deliver trusted insights faster while maintaining the rigor that matters.

Google

Capital One

Bloomberg

Pinterest

John Whalen, PhD

AI for UX Expert | Fortune 500 clientele | CEO, author & speaker

<pre><code class="language-markdown">If you're anxious that AI might make your skills obsolete, you're not alone. Customer research is changing fast—and whether you're a seasoned researcher or a designer or PM now expected to gather insights, you need to create results you can trust in an AI-powered world.

Here's the challenge: AI tools promise speed and scale, but can you trust the output? How do you maintain quality while leveraging AI's power?

The gap is widening. Some teams spend weeks gathering insights manually while AI-confident practitioners deliver trustworthy results in days at 10x scale. The difference isn't just speed—it's who gets invited to strategic conversations, who leads high-impact projects, and who shapes decisions with confidence.

This course gives you frameworks to evaluate quality and trust. You'll access enterprise-grade tools, learn from founders building these platforms, and develop critical judgment to distinguish reliable insights from AI noise.

You'll try tools yourself and form your own conclusions. No hype. Just practical expertise from someone who's tested hundreds of tools and knows what delivers trustworthy insights.</code></pre>

Create Customer Insights with AI You Can Actually Trust

Conduct AI-moderated customer interviews confidently

Extract insights from 50+ interviews using AI-powered analysis tools

Develop frameworks to assess new AI tools and know when they actually work

Use synthetic users for rapid testing and validation of ideas before launch

Guide your team or organization in adopting AI research tools and best practices

Connect with practitioners navigating AI research together and sharing insights

You've worked with customer insights in some capacity—whether you've conducted research yourself, collaborated with researchers on your team

Experience with customer research or user feedback

This is a practical course with weekly exercises using AI platforms. You'll need time to experiment and apply what you learn.

Willingness to try new tools hands-on

We use tools and prompting techniques that don't require any coding knowledge. If you can write clear instructions, you're ready.

No technical background required

Researchers seeking to deliver insights faster at scale using AI—while maintaining the quality and rigor that makes their work trustworthy.

PMs and research leaders balancing the need for rapid customer insights with concerns about maintaining quality, rigor, and team standards.

Designers seeking practical AI tools to understand users, test concepts, and make evidence-based design decisions with confidence and speed.

PayPal

You've heard about AI agents. Synthetic users. Deep thinking models that can work autonomously for hours. They sound powerful – but what do you actually do with them?These new capabilities – agentic AI that runs complex multi-step processes, synthetic users that scale research impossibly fast, systems that think deeply while you're offline – unlock something fundamentally different. Not faster prompting. True research partners that follow your direction, think through problems, and execute sophisticated workflows without you at the keyboard.This course teaches you to harness these frontier capabilities. You'll create agentic workflows that execute multi-step research processes independently. You'll deploy synthetic users informed by real research data and learn when they're valid versus when human participants are essential. You'll build systems that think for considerable time, following the exact research patterns and rigor you define.Using accessible tools like n8n and Claude Code, you'll move from prompting to orchestrating. No coding background required – but you will learn to work with an IDE, terminal, and automation platforms that unlock AI's full research potential.

Move Beyond Prompting. Harness the Full Power of Agentic AI for Research.

Build AI Agents for Your Research Workflow

Create and Deploy Synthetic Users

Build Custom Agents and Multi-Agent Systems

Overcome the Technical Barrier

Orchestrate End-to-End Research Pipelines

Lead Advanced AI Research Initiatives

While not strictly required, Course 1 provides a strong foundation. You should be experienced with prompting AI and evaluating AI outputs.

Recommended: Completion of "AI for Customer Research"

Some agentic capabilities need Claude Code or Codex ($20/month). We'll guide you through setup.

Required: Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus subscription

You'll work with an IDE, terminal, and automation platforms. We provide onboarding for non-technical researchers. New to me too! --John

Willingness to learn new technical interfaces

Alumni from "AI for Customer Research" ready to build autonomous agents, synthetic users, and workflows that work independently.<pre><code class="language-markdown"></code></pre>

Experienced researchers wanting to explore frontier capabilities—building agents, deploying synthetic users, and pushing beyond limits.

Product managers and designers ready to harness agentic AI for research—no coding background required, just curiosity to learn.

Accelerate Your Research with AI: Skills You Need in 2025

AI for UX Expert, Fortune 100 clientele, CEO, author & speaker

Learn how AI-moderated interviews, AI-enhanced analysis, and synthetic users can make your research faster and better.

Speed and Scale Data Collection and Analysis

Learn how to develop practical instincts for how (and when) to rely on AI, using enterprise-grade platforms.

Be Confident Using Advanced AI-Powered Research Tools

Develop a custom roadmap for integrating AI into each stage of your research process.

Implement an AI-Powered Insights System

Research Impact in Days (Not Weeks) with AI

Use AI to moderate interviews and gather insights instantly, unlocking speed and scale.

Accelerate Research with AI

Leverage AI-enhanced research libraries to store, search, and synthesize data faster than ever.

Scale Analysis with Smart Repositories

Learn to simulate user scenarios with AI, refining your research plan and gaining team buy-in.

Align Teams with Synthetic Users

Master AI Prompting for Customer Research

Learn to instruct AI to make prompts that are easily custom tailored to every step in your research process.

Make Custom Research Prompts for Every State of Research

Discover how to develop AI-generated interview guides that are custom tailored to your strategic needs.

Create Interview Guides ... Fast!

Understand how to use AI to quickly transform raw customer feedback into actionable product discovery insights.

10x Your Data Analysis Speeds

Essential AI Skills for Customer Research in 2025

Research will be: a) simpler, b) cheaper, c) faster, d) democratized, Your role: orchestrator. You'll need to know....

How AI is changing research

Sophisticated AI prompt engineering

Which tool to use, when to use, how to optimize, how to scale research, how to blend qual + quant.

AI-moderated qualitative research

Learn how to ask questions of your repository. Gain insights from large-scale data samples.

AI research repository research

Learn how to use synthetic customers and researchers and designers to develop a multi-agent system.

How to partner with synthetic users

How to Leverage AI Moderation & Analysis for Interviews

Learn how AI can moderate interviews for you – unlocking speed, scale and multilingual inclusion in your studies.

How AI can moderate interviews for you for speed and scale

Uncovers hidden insights across studies.  Bring together many interviews, surveys and studies you simply can't alone.

How to find patterns you’d never see alone

Find the places where human judgement is crucial.

Best practices on when to trust AI vs.  human judgment

How to Use Synthetic Users in Research and Design

Create synthetic users to animate your data and make it more compelling to stakeholders than a slide deck could ever do.

Bring Your Data to Life

Learn how synthetic users can be useful throughout your research: From kickoff to creating interview guides to analysis.

Integrate Synthetic Users into Your Workflow

Anticipate user needs by asking synthetic users.  Test concepts, marketing messages and more in a low-risk environment.

Learn directly from John Whalen